This is a story about how we had our first $10,000 day in e-commerce on Shopify. It shows the power of the press and the compounding effect of little steps that can eventually pay off if you keep working.
The short story is that we got some national news coverage, which resulted in over $20K in sales over two days. Yahoo! Shine picked up WRTV 6’s story on an Indianapolis dentist (http://www.calmingfears.com/indianapolis/coconut-oil-pulling) and oil pulling (http://www.skinnycoconutoil.com/blogs/skinny-talk/12991161-the-skinny-on-oil-pulling).
The article didn’t contain a link to our site, but the video included many pictures of the bottle and our brochure – information that people then used to search. According to Google Analytics, most searches were coming for the term “skinny coconut oil“, which is the name of the product – and they were coming to buy.
Conversion rates averaged 13% over the two days the article was on the home page of Yahoo! Shine and we actually had less traffic and more orders the second day than the first. I’m not sure if I would classify this as “going viral”, but as of this writing it has 3903 shares on Facebook and 696 comments.
Fortune favors the prepared mind. –Louis Pasteur
While it was certainly fortunate that Yahoo! Shine decided to include WRTV 6’s video featuring our oil, it was the exclamation mark on a long sentence that started back in 2013. [Note: If you’re interested in the story behind how this company got started check out, E-commerce Metric: Time to First Sale.]
One thing content marketers (and lean entrepreneurs) do well is listen. When the vice president of the company told me that our oil was good for oil pulling, I wrote a blog post about it on the dentist’s website. Soon after, the concept of oil pulling started to become more mainstream and it was becoming a hot news item because people knew relatively little about it.
After hearing a story on a business podcast about a man who got some initial publicity by walking into a newspaper office and asking to speak to someone, I asked the receptionist at the dentist’s office to contact local news agencies to see if they’d be interested in covering the topic.
A few weeks later the news agency, WRTV 6, contacted Dr. Reese and ran a story on his thoughts on oil pulling. It was this news article that was later picked up by Yahoo! Shine, which brought it to national attention and our first $10,000 day.
